News

The MY HERO International Film Festival is now underway, and The Story of Ebola has won 1st place in the Educational Category. The Festival celebrates those who create positive social change using media, art, and technology.

This is the 10th award received by The Story of Ebola. The film is an animated narrative made for “at risk” communities, especially for populations in West Africa experiencing the Ebola epidemic. It makes visible the invisible Ebola germs to help people see and understand how Ebola spreads and how to protect themselves. The film was made in collaboration with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, UNICEF, and Yoni Goodman.

Preterm birth is now the leading cause of death for children under five. One in ten babies are born too soon, often with devastating consequences for the baby and family. World Prematurity Day raises awareness of this problem and what is being done about it.

Global Health Media Project will soon release a series of videos to help health workers care for preterm babies in poor countries. These videos teach basic interventions—such as kangaroo mother care, alternative feeding methods, and infection prevention—that can save the lives of many of these babies. The videos demystify the care of small babies—often intimidating to health workers and mothers—and also model caring behavior and tenderness.

The videos complement the new global curriculum called Essential Care of Small Babies developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). AAP is providing technical support on this video series which has partial funding from the Laerdal Foundation.

Deb Van Dyke attended the rollout of the updated Helping Babies Breathe curriculum, held November 1−2 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The 2nd edition of HBB includes scientific updates, expanded education advice, strengthened implementation guidance, and new quality improvement resources. Key updates include de-emphasis of suctioning and an added option of delayed cord clamping. The meeting was sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics and LDS Charities.

The 25th anniversary of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative was celebrated at the BFHI Congress, hosted by WHO and UNICEF in Geneva (October 24-26, 2016). Global Health Media videos were shown throughout the meeting—in English, French, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Many of the 300+ participants, who came from 133 countries, were introduced to the videos for the first time.

BFHI was established in 1991 to help “protect, promote and support” breastfeeding. Over 20,000 facilities worldwide have been designated as Baby-Friendly facilities.

Breastfeeding support can be provided at scale and at very low cost using teaching videos. This was the main point of Peter Cardellichio’s lightning talk, given at the Global Nursing Caucus Conference on October 15, 2016. The lack of breastfeeding support available to new mothers worldwide is one of the key reasons more mothers aren’t successful in exclusively breastfeeding their babies until they are six months old.

The conference—organized by Seed Global Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Global Nursing Caucus—brought together nurse leaders, clinicians, and educators from around the world to discuss the critical role of nurses in strengthening health systems. The conference provided opportunities for nurses and other health colleagues to share best practices and core competencies for global health and inter-professional education.

Our breastfeeding videos—now available in Malay—were presented at the WABA Global Breastfeeding Partner Forum (Oct 2-5, 2016, held in Malaysia) by Nor Kamariah Mohamad Alwi. Kamariah shared her experience in using the videos to help train breastfeeding counselors in the skills they need to guide and assist their peers.

The videos were translated into Malay by Kamariah and several other volunteers from the Malaysian Breastfeeding Peer Counselor Association. Kamariah also narrated the videos and received local support from the BOM Production recording studio.

Support more mothers learning how to breastfeed by spreading the word about our breastfeeding videos—soon in over 20 languages!

Organizations and individuals around the world have embraced our series of videos that teach mothers how to breastfeed. After last summer’s release of the original versions in English, French, Spanish and Swahili, other organizations—including many volunteers—have been extending our reach by translating and narrating the videos into nearly 20 additional languages. Breastfeeding videos are now available in Nepali, Lao, Hmong, Khmu, Malay, Vietnamese, Kinyarwanda, and Slovak, and soon we will have versions in Haitian Creole, Tetum, Turkish, Italian, Burmese, Shan, Po-O, Karen, Rohyinga.

Our goal is to reach as many people as possible with our “how-to” videos on breastfeeding. If you would like to partner with us to translate them into even more languages, please contact us. The more languages we have, the more we can contribute to worldwide breastfeeding success!

We presented our most recent work to the Global Digital Health Network at their June monthly meeting. The Network is a 2500+ networking forum with members from 81 countries that provides leadership in digital health (mHealth, eHealth, and ICTs). It supports technical innovation in low-resource settings that contributes to better quality, accessibility, and sustainability of health services and health outcomes. Thank you Global Digital Health Network for inviting us to share our work.

ORB—a comprehensive online library of high-quality, mobile-optimized training materials for frontline health workers—marked its first year with a gathering of partners and supporters on June 1 in Washington DC. We are a content provider for ORB, and were represented at the meeting by Peter Cardellichio. GHMP and ORB share the common goal of supporting better training of health workers in low-resource settings. Our partnership with ORB is about increasing impact: we provide videos for ORB, while ORB helps distributes them and helps health workers use them more effectively. Through our partnership with ORB and mPowering Frontline Health Workers, our videos are being incorporated into new training programs being introduced in several African countries, with plans for use in many more countries over the coming year.

Our latest set of videos on the new WHO guidelines for sick newborns are featured in the Maternal Health Task Force blog. The article points to the need for sharing health care information widely to help reach the Sustainable Development Goals’ targets for reductions in neonatal mortality. MHTF is a project of the Women and Health Initiative at the Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health. They work to build a global community that has access to information and evidence that can improve care and save lives of mothers and newborns.